2 Answers
2

Any moderator feel free to correct or supercede this, it is only an approximation based on what I know about this.

Why were 7 votes reversed when there were only 4 to reverse at that
time?

The reversal happened at 22:34, which indicates it was done by a staff member by hand and not the script. As animuson pointed out in a comment:

It doesn't necessarily mean 7 were targeted. The manual tools do not
allow for picking and choosing which [of a user's] votes [to your
account] get reversed. It becomes an
all or nothing deal. And sometimes we would choose not to reverse 4
downvotes that look targeted if the user has cast, say, 20 upvotes to
your account. Since it's all or nothing, wiping the downvotes would
also wipe the upvotes, and the loss from 20 upvotes far outweighs the
gain from reversing 4 downvotes

So the user who voted for you had some more votes on your posts that were caught in the crossfire.

Where do the other three come from, did the moderator who reversed
them already know they'll come?

We don't know, you don't know. Could be the same person, could not. If you suspect they're serial voting, flag a post of your own for investigation (But wait until a day after first to see if the script gets them).

The staff member who reversed them is presumably not able to see the future when they reversed them (yesterday 22:34) so no.

The 3 votes from today are still there, why is that?

They happened after a staff member looked at your account to correct any foul play. Staff members do not consistently monitor for ongoing voting in such cases. The script only runs at the end of the day. They're still here because nobody has checked them yet and the script hasn't run.

It doesn't necessarily mean 7 were targeted. The manual tools do not allow for picking and choosing which votes get reversed. It becomes an all or nothing deal. And sometimes we would choose not to reverse 4 downvotes that look targeted if the user has cast, say, 20 upvotes to your account. Since it's all or nothing, wiping the downvotes would also wipe the upvotes, and the loss from 20 upvotes far outweighs the gain from reversing 4 downvotes.
– animuson♦Jul 10 '18 at 13:36

@animuson This is interesting. Is this behavior of CM tools documented somewhere? So if I understand this correctly, if I have 20 votes cast on user X's posts, 10 up and 10 serially down, then y'all doing anything would result in a -80 reputation net loss for the user?
– MagischJul 10 '18 at 13:38

2

Right, and that's happened before in cases where we didn't realize there were other votes in play before we ran the reversal script, and the user ended up losing reputation instead of gaining as expected. But it's fairly rare that it happens. I've only not acted on maybe 4 or 5 cases where a user would've been worse off doing the reversal.
– animuson♦Jul 10 '18 at 13:41

1

Cool. I have edited my answer to reflect the new information.
– MagischJul 10 '18 at 13:42

2

@animuson wait—isn’t serial voting unwanted, regardless of the direction? So ten up votes targeted at the same user should get the same treatment as ten down votes, shouldn’t they? Your last comment sounds like, well, let’s assume, I want to make someone the gift of eight up votes. Then, all I need to do, is give that user ten up votes and ten down votes, with the net effect of +80, and you are not going to do something about it. Sounds like a loophole.
– HolgerJul 10 '18 at 16:08

@Holger No, the point is that there are sometimes other legitimate votes that have been cast in the past, and then something happens in the present that cause them to target the user. The invalidation wipes everything, legitimate and not legitimate, without regard. So sometimes it's more beneficial to just sweat out a few targeted downvotes in order to keep past upvotes that were cast legitimately.
– animuson♦Jul 10 '18 at 16:10

1

@animuson Can you please remove the new downvotes, and possibly block the user from downvoting me again? They seem not to like me and will just downvote again and again
– baaoJul 10 '18 at 16:10

1

@animuson okay, then I didn’t understand “everything” correctly. So you’re saying, to reverse serial voting of one day, you have to reverse any vote that user ever made (on the specific user—I hope)? This doesn’t apply to the automatic reversal script, does it? What’s the rationale behind that “all or nothing” restriction?
– HolgerJul 10 '18 at 16:15

2

@animuson To your other comments - I think missing an upvote is not as bad as having a correct answer voted to -1. The missing upvote and missing rep, I don't care; but future visitors will think the answer is wrong when it has downvotes. So I think it would be more helpful for the site to remove those unjustified downvotes to stop the vote from indicating "wrong" content, what the answer possibly isn't; even if it's on the cost of some reputation
– baaoJul 10 '18 at 16:17

1

@bambam ironically, when the serial voter misbehaves enough to get their account deleted, all votes are reversed and nobody cares about the net effect of the reversed votes.
– HolgerJul 10 '18 at 16:21

1

@Holger No it doesn't apply to the automated script, only manual intervention wipes everything. But yes, if we manually get involved, all votes cast to the user will be wiped. Our tools simply don't allow us to pick and choose which ones.
– animuson♦Jul 10 '18 at 16:23

3

@Holger I think animuson's approach is a very fair one; however, I think helpfulness for future visitors must be more important than someone's virtual reputation points. Even if it's mine...
– baaoJul 10 '18 at 16:25

@Holger: I've lost a ridiculous amount of rep to that. But then again I got ridiculous amount of rep from an old fastest-gun-in-the-west answer that a donor made much better.
– JoshuaJul 10 '18 at 20:37

@bambam it's not possible to block votes. If you notice a repeat of this then do what you did previously and raise a custom flag saying it's happened before, perhaps link to this meta post, and we'll review it... We'll take further action than requesting vote invalidation if warranted.
– Jon Clements♦Jul 11 '18 at 8:03

Stack Overflow detects the patterns and reverses it back after some time. The same thing happened to me around 8 months ago. Someone opened the questions I answered and kept down voting my answers. The next day I got my points back with a notification of "Voting Corrected"

PS. It happened for around 2 days if I remember correctly but I was calm since I knew I would get the points back.